Not many. I hadn't started with many, and some got lost in the years of moving and hiding and starting over. But I'd gone back to the estate twice after it happened, once at nineteen, once at twenty-two, and both times I took what I could carry from what was left. This was it.
My parents. My father's brothers. The handful of gatherings where other families were there too, where my father stood inrooms with other powerful men and I was a kid in the corner, watching the way kids watch the things they aren't meant to understand yet.
I spread them on the desk.
I didn't know what I was looking for. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just needed a minute with familiar faces, to remember why I was here and let the evening settle back down the way it usually did.
There was one of me and Uncle Eamon on the harbor wall.
I must have been seven or eight. He had an arm around me and we both squinted into the sun. I was holding a paper cone of chips, and you could tell from my face he'd just said the thing that made me laugh. Eamon Brennan. My father's right hand, the man who ran the family's money and came to Sunday dinner every week of my childhood and taught me half of what I know about reading people. He showed me a card trick once that I still do when my hands need something to keep them busy. He went back into the fire for my mother the night the cliffs burned, and neither of them came out. I've spent a long time counting him among the people I couldn't save.
I touched his face in the photograph and set it gently aside, the way you handle the dead.
My father at a gathering, ten years before the end. Laughing at something, head half-turned, one hand raised in a gesture I still remember. Beside him, a man I only ever knew as one of his associates. I never got the name. Only that he came from Ireland, that he mattered, and that the conversations stopped when I walked into the room.
Behind them, out of focus, barely in the frame.
I brought the photograph to the lamp.
A gathering, not a family. A dark-haired woman, a man with his hand on her shoulder, and three boys crowded in front of them with the stiff misery of children made to hold still for acamera. Not brothers, by the faces. The particular mismatched cluster you got when allied houses raised their sons in and out of each other's doors. The oldest was already tall. Already had that stillness I knew from eldest sons in families like ours, the ones told early what they'd be and already busy becoming it.
The youngest boy was grinning at something outside the frame.
Not a careful smile. Not a social one. The real kind, the kind that goes all the way up, that says a person finds the world genuinely funny and won't pretend otherwise.
I knew that grin.
I'd watched it an hour ago, across my own bar.
The photograph shook. I realized it was my hand doing it, laid it flat on the desk, pressed both palms down, and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The system I taught myself at fifteen, when I had nothing else to lean on.
That was him.
The boy in the photograph was the man who'd sat at my bar tonight. Who ordered my father's whiskey by name, no hesitation. Who told me his grandfather said the Madigans made the finest whiskey in Ireland. Who said someone was still thinking about them.
Who knew exactly who I was.
It didn't land like a shock. It landed like water finding its level. Slow and cold. He'd known. From the second he walked in, maybe before it. He knew who I was, and he sat at my bar and drank my father's whiskey and looked me in the face and said all of it anyway.
I stood up. I sat back down.
I pressed my fingers to my mouth and ran the numbers the way I run them when something happens I didn't plan for. He was from Dunraven. He knew the whiskey. He had the coast in his eyes. I pulled the photo closer, to the man's hand on thewoman's shoulder, the oldest boy's stillness, the whole shape of a family I'd studied harder than any other.
Kerrigan.
He was Kerrigan. Maybe not the name, but the world. The couple in the back of my father's photograph were the heads of the Kerrigan house, and the boys in front of them were their son and the ones raised alongside him, and the man at my bar tonight was one of those boys. Grown, but the grin gave him up.
One of the three. The men I'd spent my whole adult life keeping an ocean between.
I laughed.
It came out wrong. Too sharp, nothing funny under it, and I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to keep the rest of it down. I sat in my small clean apartment above my bar, under my dead family's name, and I laughed until it turned into something that wasn't laughing, and then I made it stop.
He knew.
He knew and did nothing. Didn't grab me, didn't threaten me, didn't make a single move. He talked to me. He drank his drink. He said those things about my family and walked out into the cold.
Why?
